Percussionist Evelyn Glennie brought a scaled-back version of her ample artistry to Herbst Theatre on Sunday night. In place of the arsenal of instruments with which she generally delivers her high-voltage bangs and crashes, the Scottish virtuoso concentrated mostly on the marimba, with brief forays to the snare drum, maracas and bongos.

The effect was a little less flamboyantly theatrical than usual, though some carefully choreographed lighting made up the difference. But the solid core of musicianship that underlies her artistry remained constant.

That musicianship extends not only to the technical bravura that she brings to performance, but the craft and insight with which she tackles a wide range of musical styles and approach (an adulatory documentary, "Touch the Sound," played during the recent San Francisco International Film Festival and is due for a wider release later this year).

Appearing under the auspices of San Francisco Performances, Glennie wasted no time in establishing a sense of propulsiveness for this solo recital. "Fluctus," a dashing three-minute curtain-raiser by Serbian composer Nebojsa Zivkovic, got the evening off to vivacious start, with Glennie sweeping and swooping across the marimba's full five-octave range.

From there, the program pursued some of the unfamiliar byways that come with the solo percussion territory (much of Glennie's repertoire is either new or commissioned). Matthias Schmitt's "Six Miniatures" for marimba followed the tradition of Schumann and Bartók of writing music of substance and beauty for beginning instrumentalists, and Glennie dispatched them with touching grace.

Two sweetly soft-edged marimba works by Keiko Abe -- the melodic "Michi" and the gently repetitive "Memories of the Seashore" -- brought out the instrument's subtler side. For contrast there were Toshimitsu Tanaka's Two Movements for Marimba and Leigh Howard Stevens' "Rhythmic Caprice," a jazzy closer in which Glennie produced a crisp, clacking sound by hitting the sides of the keys with her mallet handles.

Things were iffier away from the marimba. "Prim," an aggressively uninteresting etude for solo snare drum by the Icelandic composer Askell Masson, seems to figure on every Glennie program and rarely gets any more compelling. Javier Alvarez's "Temazcal" combined Glennie's maracas -- played in tight, pinpoint rhythms -- with taped sounds of percussion and mechanical clanking and screeching before closing with an amiable Mexican coda that uses the maracas in a more traditional way.

The one encore, Roberto Sierra's "Bongo-O," closed the evening on a fiercely explosive note.